Herald Changelog
The latest updates at Herald.
The changes below are Herald additions and updates that are backwards compatible. In the event of a change that may affect your integration with Herald, you'll be contacted in advance to ensure you have sufficient time to adjust. Read more in our guide to High Impact Changes at Herald.
Introducing Data Extractions (Beta)
Streamline quote-and-bind workflow with PDF extraction
Herald recently announced the launch of its Data Extraction feature to streamline the insurance quote-and-bind workflow by enabling brokerages to extract unstructured data from PDF documents—such as application forms—and integrate them into their systems
You can leverage the /data_extraction endpoint to post and retrieve data from PDFs that you upload via the existing /files endpoint. See step-by-step guidance here.
Note that /data_extraction is a beta endpoint. If you would like to request access to this beta release, please contact support@heraldapi.com.
Shareable links in HeRB
We’ve enabled customers to share links at every stage of the quote and bind process in HeRB. For example, you could easily share a link to a quote with your colleagues via email, or share with Herald customer success representative a bind application you need help with.
Additional feature enhancements and bug fixes
- We’ve added customer and agent facing tooltips to the appendix, allowing customers to view tooltips in the /application endpoint response
- We’ve simplified our /insurance_parameters relevance and combined identical conditionals for different products
- We’ve removed a set of conditional parameters for a carrier’s EPLI product to stay in sync with carrier requirements
- We’ve fixed a bug related to authorized vendor parameters for a Management Liability product
- We’ve fixed a bug related to re-rate flow
- We’ve fixed a bug related to a carrier’s MPL file failure in the new quote processor flow
Quickstart guide
Off to the races
Last time, we released a fake carrier and fake products so that developers could play around in our sandbox environment. This week, we took that concept one step further by writing a quickstart guide for developers who want to get started right away. This guide provides eager developers with the following tools:
- A quickstart token (that only has access to our fake carriers and products)
- Interactive examples
- A step-by-step guide with details about how to get your first quotes.
Spend less time in integration meetings and more time building great experiences for your brokers and customers!
A new toy in the sandbox
Encouraging developers to play around
We want to make it easy for developers to explore our API and see how easy connecting to insurance carriers can be with Herald. At the same time, we make sure our carrier partners’ products are only accessible to developers at approved distribution partners. This restriction has meant that developers who are curious about Herald have needed to wait for carrier approvals before they can start playing around.
This release, we launched a fake carrier called “Herald” that new developers can use to explore our API before they get explicit approval from any of our (very real) carrier partners.
Fixes and improvements
In addition to improving our ability to onboard new developers, we also added additional features and improved the performance of our API. Here are the latest fixes and improvements:
- We added support for Trucking class codes in our General Liability product line
- We updated our internal alerts to flag when requests are made on behalf of producers who don’t have access to any products in a submission. These alerts will help us improve our customer support and maximize the number of quotes our distribution partners receive.
- We fixed a bug where in some instances limits were returned as a string rather than an integer.
- We updated the names of some risk parameters to improve clarity. For instance, we updated the parameter for the name of an individual at the insured who should be contacted about the policy from “insured name” to “insured contact name.”
- We improved the “data coercion” for the General Liability Products and Completed Operations Limit so that applicants receive the closest possible policy to the one they requested.
Workers' Compensation
Our first workers' compensation carrier
Sorry we didn’t write to you two weeks ago. We were busy meeting with folks at Insuretech Connect in Las Vegas! It was the first industry conference where Herald was represented (and it was a blast).
This week we launched our first carrier for our second line of business: workers’ compensation. In addition to having a lot of demand for this line of business, we saw value in supporting multiple lines of insurance as quickly as possible. Here’s what is new for workers’ compensation:
- We created new workers’ compensation risk parameters.
- We created a standard set of workers’ compensation coverage parameters across multiple carriers’ products.
- You can now request quotes for products from multiple lines of business in a single request.
Fixes and improvements
In addition to adding workers’ compensation as a line of business, we also expanded some features and improved performance of existing ones. Here are the latest fixes and improvements:
- One of our carriers requires us to whitelist the IPs addresses of all servers that send in API requests. In order to support integrations with this carrier (and others like them) we set up a proxy server through which we route all relevant requests.
- Our carrier partners can now use the Herald Sandbox environment to test out our integration of their own products.
- We restructured some risk parameters so that they are no longer nested under NAICS code, namely “total payroll” and “gross sales.”
- We added security controls to ensure that platforms cannot see submissions they are not entitled to see.
- Developers can now send in the insured representative name and contact information for certain products. Because this information is required at bind, this will accelerate that process for those products.
- We are also excited to be growing the Herald team! We added a new page on our website where you can learn about Careers at Herald. The thumbnail below is of our “filter friday!”